Good find! And a nice story to boot. Thanks!
Apparantly the Spitfires were great flyers; was reading an account of an American squadron in Italy that had their reverse lendlease Spitfires switched out to P51s. They were not happy about the change.
My father flew bombers in WWII, B24s in the South Pacific. Mostly bombing Indonesian oil fields, the Philipines, running anti-shipping patrols. I asked once what the most nerve wracking part of it was for him. He felt that the bomb runs themselves were so busy, that they didn't have time to worry much. But because his B24 had the best gas mileage in the squadron, they were the plane that got to circle around any of the other bombers that had to ditch, waiting for the PBY Catalinas to come in to rescue the downed crews. That was the worst.